This production was at the Lansburgh Theater, which is the
third venue I’ve visited for Shakespeare in DC and also the third most
interesting. It’s smaller than the Harman, both in seating and the stage, but
nowhere near as quirky as the Folger. In this production, the set is suggestive
of a posh neo-classical country house drawing room, and the royal household of
King Leontes are all dressed smartly, which gives it the feel of an episode of
Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Being one of Agatha Christie’s biggest fans,
this is an early point in the production’s favour. It’s also quite apt as
Hermione is played by an actress (Hannah Yelland) whom the program informs me
has appeared in Poirot. She did look familiar and so did Leontes (Mark
Harelik) – I couldn’t decide whether I had seen him on television or if it was
just because he reminded me of Rupert Everett, but it turns out he plays the
boss of the physics department in The Big Bang Theory. So this is my
first American Shakespeare with actors I have seen on the telly. They’re not
exactly John Lithgow, but it’s something. The country house weekend mood is
maintained with the drinking from decanters and the slightly tipsy behaviour.
This quite pleasant Edwardian/Wodehouse ambience is
ominously interrupted by Leontes’ increasingly paranoid asides, and the dark
effect is accentuated with strange, David Lynch-like noises (think the
nightmarish bits from Mulholland
Drive ) and eerie pale blue lighting, which
suggests more than a hint of some shadowy psychosis. This suggestion of mental
imbalance is useful because from the dialogue alone we never really get a
satisfactory explanation for Leontes’ sudden, groundless, and deadly suspicion.
He seems to be comfortable in his world and his power is absolute. This is no
Othello and there is no Iago to whisper poison in his ear. At the same time,
the fear of unfaithfulness must be almost universal, and one could imagine it
eating away at a mind that can get its way on every other issue but that. So
this is a study in paranoia; even when a loyal and beloved servant attempts to
use reason to defuse his suspicion, Leontes can only say ‘thou liest Camillo
and I hate thee’.
In the first half this is a tale of misery, as has been
suggested by Leontes’ son in the first scene, who says that ‘a sad tales’ best
for winter’. So this play seems at first to be the inverse in all respects of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. But in that case we would expect the tragic
elements to continue throughout, which isn’t so. The play is set up for tragedy
but ends as comedy, making it a little disconcerting for the audience. The
first half is tragic without, except for some words of Hermione’s, enough of
the redeeming nobility of tragedy. But the second half is a farce. Rather than
attempt to bring those parts together into a harmonious whole, for example by
downplaying the most poisonous aspects of the first half and emphasising the
dramatic and serious aspects of the second half, this production deepens and
widens the chasm between the two worlds. In the first half, the horror of
Leontes’ behaviour is played for all it is worth. The stage reflects the
obsessive suspicion of his poisoned mind and the actor’s performance is
physical enough to shock. Sitting in the second row was an incredibly
uncomfortable experience at times as the entire atmosphere took on the
suffocating closeness of a broken marriage under the shadow of domestic
violence. The death of their son, the end of Leontes friendship with Polixenes,
even the trial of Hermione, felt weightless in comparison with the pulsating
rage and barely contained power of Leontes when he at one point flew across the
stage to grab Hermione. Likewise, the second half contained added elements of
physical farce and comedy, so the contrast between the two halves was dramatic,
but not necessarily successful. Whilst the farce gave emotional relief, it did
not really ‘make right’ or justify the action from the first half. The setting
seems odd too, being set in Sicily with
seaborne visits to landlocked Bohemia .
The names are mostly Greek, rather than Sicilian or Bohemian (unless it is set
in the ancient world when Sicily was Greek, but then that was before Bohemia
existed). They swear by a mix of Roman and Greek gods: ‘By Jove’, ‘Apollo be my
Judge’ and then they send to the Greek Delphic Oracle. So it is set in a hybrid
world of ancient/modern, Greek/Roman.
This play has also sometimes been criticised for the meek portrayal
of the female characters, especially Hermione. She doesn’t hesitate to forgive
Leontes for his atrocious behaviour, which seems a little too easy on Leontes.
But this is unfair. He has, after all, spent 16 years in miserable repentance.
And if we follow the hints that Hermione has been alive the whole time in
Paulina’s house, then it would seem that she could have revealed herself much
earlier once she knew he was sorry. The fact that she waited so long suggests
that she has already punished him, so there is no longer any need to cast a
shadow over their reunion. There is also the issue that Shakespeare was writing
in a man’s world. To say that women in such a world sometimes have to meekly
accept injustice is not necessarily to endorse that world (and the goodness of
Hermione, contrasted with the mad tyranny of Leontes could easily be read as
criticism of male dominance). And the character of Paulina is the strongest in
the play, much more forceful than her husband Antigonus, more just than King
Leontes and, through her protection of Hermione, wiser than all of them. When
Leontes asks Antigonus ‘canst thou not rule her?’, the answer for the audience
is an emphatic and clear, ‘no he canst not’!
The program flagged up the apparently innovative (but also
authentic) use of double roles for most of the actors, but I’m not sure we
really gained much from it. On paper, pairing Leontes with Autolycus seems apt
– Autolycus is the fool of Bohemia and Leontes
has shown himself a kingly fool in Sicily . But
mostly there was no real connection between the Sicilian and Bohemian pairings.
And one of them was frankly odd without being interesting. The prince Murmillo
and princess Perdita were played by the same actress, which had a superficial
logic in that they were brother and sister, one born around the time the other
died. And I have nothing at all against actors taking on different genders,
which after all was done all the time by Shakespeare. But for a girl to play a
boy the girl should at least look fairly boyish, which was really not the case
here, with a Rubens-esque young lady playing the male child Murmillo. The actor
portraying Florizel came across as weak and dainty, rather than dashing and
princely, but fortunately he is not a key character.
The eccentricities of the plot have inspired me to develop
my own, probably wrong and definitely un-provable, theory of its creation. The
reasons for the kings jealousy are never explained, and we never really know
for sure that Hermione is innocent, thought that is surely the conclusion we
are pointed to. I believe that this play started out as an idea for a history
play on Henry VIII – that towering figure of the Tudor period and renowned
doubter of female fidelity. So Hermione is the adulteress Anne Boleyn, Perdita
is Queen Elizabeth, and the emphasis towards the end on a King’s duty to
remarry and beget an heir is both a reflection of Henry’s on-going quest to
father princes and a reflection of the worry in Elizabethan England about what
chaos and strife might follow upon the approaching death of the childless
Elizabeth. But Shakespeare was much too sensible to put on such a play that
might offend his monarch. Thus the names and locations are changed. Even so, to
further reduce the dangers to Shakespeare’s life, the plot is then changed
midway from tragedy to comedy, and becomes a fantasy about what would have
happened if Anne Boleyn had been innocent and had not really died.
Anyway…
… The Winter’s Tale is not one of Shakespeare’s best
plays, and I would guess that it came early on in the period when Shakespeare
was experimenting with tragi-comedies. But it is still an absorbing journey
into strangeness, and an excellent, if frustratingly mysterious, study of the
madness of jealousy.
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